Tag Archives: newspaper business models

The Web strategy hamster wheel

By Michael Becker | Published: March 10, 2010
Today our company’s CEO paid us a visit. To mark the occa­sion, we had a meet­ing to talk about how much con­tent our paper should be putting online. Our cor­po­rate own­ers have a pol­icy about how much con­tent we and the other papers should be putting online for free. I won’t give a num­ber, but [...]
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Maybe paying for news online is a good thing

By Michael Becker | Published: October 26, 2009
The Columbia Journalism Review tells me that the Wall Street Journal has sur­passed USA Today in cir­cu­la­tion num­bers, mak­ing it the most widely cir­cu­lated news­pa­per in the country. Note too that the Journal has seen growth in its cir­cu­la­tion while also charg­ing for its online con­tent. Newsday will also start up a pay sys­tem this [...]
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Self-flagellation

By Michael Becker | Published: October 10, 2009
Alan Mutter: Customers only buy prod­ucts – or, in the case of news­pa­pers, use them for free on the Internet – because they see a value in them. They don’t do it because they feel sorry for the ven­dor or the ven­dor feels sorry for himself. Yet, news­pa­pers can’t seem to stop their inces­sant self-flagellation [...]
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Foley: “We will witness the collective suicide of scores of news organizations”

By Michael Becker | Published: September 27, 2009
I missed this back in August, but it’s worth a look even now. Stephen Foley writes in The Independent that news­pa­pers that fol­low Rupert Murdoch’s lead and try to charge for their con­tent may be sign­ing a col­lec­tive sui­cide pact. It’s des­per­ate stuff. It won’t work, and if news­pa­per exec­u­tives on both sides of the Atlantic [...]
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Why it’s bad to cite iTunes as proof that micropayments will work

By Michael Becker | Published: September 23, 2009
Forgive me for post­ing Patrick Thornton’s whole para­graph with­out much in the way of com­ment, but I don’t think it needs much. Yes, Apple makes money off of micro trans­ac­tions on the iTunes store and does sell songs for $0.69–1.29. First, there is a huge dif­fer­ence between sell­ing a song for 99 cents and sell­ing an [...]
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